Never heard of Rain before but apparently it's out in October; looks pretty nice.

Apparently it was a really big deal on the NES so it depends how far back 'retro' is for you specifically. I never played it at the time because I was a touch too young to have a games console in the NES days but I gave it a shot in an emulator the other day and it doesn't really stand up (shock!). The remake doesn't do much to change that apparently.

I did play the NES one and it was a very well put together game (which Capcom did a lot of at that time) , the new one retains the 2 button control system but adds shiny graphics , voices from the cartoon (virtually all the original cast) and some crappy cutscenes

Theres a Giantbomb quick look of it which will remind you of it if you've played it in the past but they are very 'meh' on the whole thing

http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/quick-l ... 2300-7796/

It is actually a brilliant game, but I think we'd be making more of it if we were American.

It's very faithful to the original and because it's made by Capcom, it plays like a Mega Man game. Again, something that wasn't exactly massive over here at the time.

Leaving PS Plus this month:
28th August: Need for Speed Most Wanted
28th August: ICO and Shadow of the Colossus HD Collection
28th August: Demon’s Souls
28th August: LEGO Lord of the Rings
28th August: When Vikings Attack

Entering PS Plus this month:
28th August: Assassin’s Creed 3
28th August: The Jak and Daxter Trilogy
28th August: Stealth Inc: A Clone In The Dark
28th August: Urban Trial Freestyle
28th August: New Little King’s Story

Wow, that's quick for Stealth Inc - I bought it on release last month!

Fucksticks.

Get PS+ quick & download it !!

Grab them while you can!

Aye, looks like I'll need to cash in that PSN+ card sooner than I was expecting. I'll leave it as late as I can though so I stand a slight chance of maybe finishing TLOU before I have to start my free three months. Calendar entry set for the 27th!

Or you can just have my disc versions of them. I don't need them now I have PS+.

How about if for some reason I can't play them for free via PSN+ I borrow it off you? Which is to say: thank you, that's a very nice offer.

You're welcome. Just let me know.

They are difficult games, though.

Aye, I'm expecting their previous-gen mechanics and my general cack-handedness to clash violently here. I've heard so much about them though that I'm determined to give them both a shot, like checking out a piece of gaming history or something. In the back of my head ICO does sound like a single long escort quest though so I'm not sure whether I'll have the patience for it, but SotC I'm very much looking forward to.

Ico is not too hard, at least control-wise. There was one puzzle that had me temporarily stuck. If not for that, I am pretty sure I would have finished the game in one sitting on my first playthrough, because I was that hooked (and the game is only around 5-6 hours long) - which made getting stuck quite maddening.

It is a single long escort quest, pretty much. But it's not a shit escort quest, unlike most. Basically you're preventing abduction rather than bullets.

Oh, and Ico has a secret location that it advertises quite blatantly, and I was so close to finding it on my own, but in the end I had to resort to a FAQ for the specific way to open it up, which is something that bothers me to this day.

Both Ico & Sotc are on my list to play, started Ico on the PS2 but never completed it.
Need to finish of Dead Space, GOW-Judgement & Thomas was alone first.

Was it the water-wheel by chance? Maddeningly irritating that was. Everything except that was fantastic.

Nope, although I do remember a bit of trial-and-error there. I can't really explain it without spoilzors, so

Is little kings story on ps3 or vita?

I remember! Yeah, I did a bit of messing about with that too as there appears to be several options that weren't right. The water wheel jump was almost game breaking for me, though, the jump is so spazzy that you don't think you can actually do it but you can.

Vita

Oooh, I played that Puppeteer demo yesterday. I played a bit before 9PM but then I had an urgent appointment for some Bezzie Gaming so I turned it off ... twenty minutes later I was back on it to finish the rest of the demo.

Here's my opinion: Has this been made using Little Big Planet or summats?

It wasn't really interesting enough for me but it had plenty of ideas thrown in and was doing a really good job of its single screen puppet show schtick.

It looks nice, it's reasonably entertaining but the platforming is too spongy like LBP. Worth a download for a looky look anyway but I sharn't be dropping any coinage.

Don't forget tonight.

It's the PS+ changey-roo day!

I hope no one missed out on anything that's no longer available.

Succeasfully grabbed ICO and SotC last night!

Play them! Play them until the tears make your face melt off like a thawing glacier.

I might well make a start on one of them this very night. Does it matter at all which one I play first?

Neither are very long - about 5/6 hours each. ICO was first and they're sorta connected in a sense I suppose, so I'd go for ICO first.

That's what I was thinking, ICO it is. Although 5/6 hours on anyone else's watch probably means about three weeks a piece for me.

This months PS+ is basically for us Vita owners. The Jax & Daxter is in the PS+ exclusives at the minute rather than the instant game collection. It'll probably move over in a day or two. I thought it was for the PS3 but apparently it's not.

Stealth is cross-buy (yay, cross-buy).

Urban Trials is, yes, a motorbike game that was all the rage 6 months ago. It's pretty nice from what I've just played and has some added weirdness of slamming your photo face online, giving you ghosts to ride and multiple mini challenges in each race (highest/longest jump etc).

Also, I can't download the Resistence demo for the Vita on the Vita. I've had to DL it on the PS3 and transfer it over.

Have they stopped giving away PSone games on PS+?

I've been a member of PS+ for about 4-5 months now and I've never had a PS1 game on there.

Oh.. so that'll be a yes then.

It's usually three PS3 games and a couple of Vita ones.

Mickey Moose: Castle of Illusion - HD revamp is oot.

Oooooh, RAIN coming 2 October for a tenner. Vee dot interested.

So, for want of anywhere more fitting to put them: thoughts on ICO and Shadow of the Colossus. Myp and Saturnalian might want to just look away now.

ICO
The atmosphere of the game was very nice and will stay with me. The almost complete lack of music allied with the ambient soundscape created by the designers does much to build a world for you to play around in. The castle itself is also well designed and feels a 'real' building rather than just a load of polygons stacked together. I particularly liked the way the game slowly joined all the bits of it together e.g. a whole, seemingly pointless, section I stumbled on half way through ended up being the route I re-entered the castle through later on.

The rest of it ranged from meh to irriating though. The core gameplay just wasn't particularly interesting (a bit of platforming and some block sliding basically) and the only unique thing about it--your escorting of Yorda--really detracted for a couple of specific reasons.

For one thing, her 'AI' was teeth-gratingly stupid. There are quite a few places you're supposed to stand on one side of a gap and encourage her to jump over so you could both proceed. On a couple of occasions though she just wouldn't make the jump and indeed would shake her head in that way she does to tell you she's not going to do it. This, of course, sends you scurrying around the level looking for the block you need to push or the level you need to pull in order to create an alternative router for her. Only after ages spent wandering around do you crack and look up a walkthrough only to find that she should make the jump and will if you fuck around for a while until you to find the exact spot that'll kick her AI into life and she'll do it. This really did happen more than once to me and is just bullshit of the highest order because you've no way to tell the difference between AI fuckup and more exploration required. Well, there is one way actually which is that, if you're off exploring in the only other direction you can go to try and work out what you're doing and she gets attacked by monsters, then you're probably doing it wrong. Not definitely; but probably. Thanks game!

Which sort of leads on to the other issue: the shadow monsters. They're pointless. They're so unutterably easy to murder, especially when you get the sword, that Yorda's never in any real danger from them and every encounter with them is just a tedious barrier between you and the next door/block puzzle/lever pull. The only time I actually lost Yorda to them was during one of the occasions the AI fucked up and I'd thus inadvertently wandered off into a puzzle I was supposed to have Yorda with me for. So when the game got bored and sicced some monsters on her I simply didn't get back quickly enough to murder them. None of which does anything to endear you to Yorda and it all just reinforced how much of pain it was having her with you. In games like this most of the fun comes from running around exploring; mentally mapping the space and trying to piece together the puzzles. In ICO though you're not allowed to do that, you've always got to thinking about where left twinkletits and worry about whether she's too far back and maybe you should run back and check on here etc; and that just got on my tits to be honest. It's certainly not as awful as the escort quests in most games but it added little and, at times, detracted much.

So, um, yeah, I wasn't really all that impressed. The atmosphere aside, the bare bones of the game wasn't that interesting and the unique thing it does bring to the table (the ICO/Yorda dynamic) was pretty annoying at times even without the teeth-gratingly stupid AI fuckups. I did quite like the story though and was left pondering the meaning of it all well after the credits rolled so hats off to them for that.

Shadow of the Colossus
I could see the potential in this much more so than in ICO. Again, the atmosphere was excellent and by the end of the intro I was genuinely looking forward to playing it; plus the graphics were a shitload better which helped because I'm a bit shallow like that. Initially, despite holding my sword up as instructed, nothing happened to show me where the first colossus was so I spent quite a bit of time just wandering around. It wasn't entirely unpleasant as it's a nice game world (I even noticed the white tailed lizards and got me some tails!) but after nothing happened for a while I had to do a quick cheaty look at a walkthrough just to get going. A bit of platforming then a big thing to murder, excellent. I got to grips with the basic mechanics relatively easily so the first guy went down quite quickly. I even accidentally found the move where you jump and then bring the sword down and it does shitloads of damage which fair moved things along. Good stuff so far.

Still having no idea where the fuck I was going I spent even longer wandering around and was well annoyed when I found a big beach (as per the vague instruction from the terribly written disembodied voice in the main temple) with an obvious looking path down to it and there was no fucking colossus. After giving up for the night and reloading tonight the sword compass thing started working so I was quickly led to the second guy. I noticed his initial weak spots straight away and after exploiting those he went down even faster than the first guy. He never actually swung a big fuck-off club at me or tried to stamp on me or did much of anything really so I felt pretty guilty about murdering him and sort of wished I hadn't.

I should mention at this point that the controls were already getting on my tits. I realise that a bit of randomness as struggling to maintain your grip on a thrashing beast is the entire point but there's also a lot of time where you want Wander to just climb up onto the ledge he's gripping the side of and he won't do it until you move the camera to a particular angle. Which is a pain in the cock because you don't usually realise that's what he's needs you to do, because it's so counter-intuitive, until you've been hammering the triangle button for about ten second (watching your stamina leach away the entire time). When you mix that sort of tendency and the aforementioned thrashing beasts you spend a lot of time pushing the stick in a direction and never being quite sure what set of factors is governing your movement (or lack thereof). I never entirely felt in control during the beast-climbing and that didn't do much to endear me to it all.

I move on to the third guy and have a bit of trouble working out how to get onto him. After figuring that out I'm clambering around and quite easily finding his weak spots but when I'm hitting them his health is only going down by a minuscule amount. I'm seriously wailing right on the big blue symbol and he's making the right noises and the black stuff's coming out but the health bar: he does not go down by more than a sliver. Right about this time something else begins to crystallise: I'm pretty bored. Riding around the place isn't that much fun after the novelty wears off (and the horse is a pain to control and the camera fights you ever inch of the fucking way) plus climbing around on the Collossi isn't really doing much for me in general and the idea of repeatedly painfully working my way back onto this third one so I can take a ballhair of health off him each time seems like a pretty miserable experience. I stopped and asked myself why I was actually doing it and didn't really have much of an answer so I quit and deleted it. Not in a rage or anything, just in a 'I'm not enjoying this very much so I think I'll stop' sort of way. With a whimper rather than bang if you will.

I can't really say I hated it or anything and there's some interesting ideas in there but...I just didn't find it very much fun. Basically. Indeed I played it for as long as I did almost entirely so I'd have something to say when people off the internet asked me about it which, I finally realised, with the third Colossus' help, isn't a great reason to do anything. I might have persevered with it but I'm staring down the barrel of quite a few other games I could be playing that I'm pretty sure I will enjoy and, let's not forget, a whole new generation looms on the horizon so sorry SotC you just weren't fun enough to survive in such a hostile entertainment environment.

The game story basically explores this part. Shame you gave up.

]

I'm assuming you did actually 'charge' your stab fully each time, right?

Yep. Or it certainly seemed to anyway.

I think if there are multiple weak spots, then each of them accounts for a certain fraction of the colossus' health, and you have to get round to each of them, you can't just keep going back to the same one.

You'll have to remind me which one the third Colossi was, but some weak points had an order to them or sometimes you'd done enough on one weak point and had to move onto the next. If you weren't making a dent there was probably another you should have been looking for/hitting.

Anyhoo, that's by the by, cause you've jacked it in. Back to hidden puzzle games for you.

They're not hidden, I know exactly where they are.

And don't be a dick dude, just because I didn't enjoy a game you liked.

Big one with a sword that you have to get to hit into the ground to break its wrist to gain easy access. 2 weak points on normal, I believe.

Batman Arkham City.

I would argue there are differences between the two situations but all the arguments sounds pretty mealy mouthed in my head so let's call that a fair cop.

As Dave says, the one in question has two, one on top of the head and one on the belly, and I had a go at both of them but neither seemed to be making much impact. Indeed I ended up at the belly one first and would usually just wail away at the first one I came across until it was exhausted (i.e. the blue rune light fades away) but I tried moving to the head because I was getting nowhere thinking maybe I had to do them in some kind of order. When the head one wasn't getting my anywhere either I started to question whether I was enjoying it or not.

In the end it was a combination of factors (annoying camera, difficult horse controls*, lack of engagement with the central mechanic, feeling of not being entirely in control sapping my enjoyment when colossi climbing) that led me to think I'd be having more fun playing something else. Life's too short and the unplayed game pile too high to spend time battling away at something that's not entertaining me which, lest we forget, is supposed to be the point of all this.

Maybe I would have enjoyed both games if I'd played them at the time but coming to them clean having only played modern games there's something jarring enough about the execution that I just couldn't get immersed in them. I daresay other people would have a similar experience with Wind Waker which I adore.

*I was reading up on SotC last night and came across some comments by the director where he said they wanted to make the horse more 'real' by having it not entirely obey your commands but they'd had to be careful not to make it so real in that respect that it interfered with the playability of the game. Obviously, for me at least, they didn't tone it down far enough.